It Took Breast Cancer For Me To Learn To Look After Myself

Writer Kate Figes asks why it took something so drastic for her to invest in her own self-care – and how now she’s done it there’s no going back

Like most women, I have spent much of my life putting others first. After a spell of youthful abandon, I married, started a family and devoted myself to doing everything I could to helping my daughters grow up well. I worked at home so that I could be there to play or help with homework. I cooked nutritious meals, and wrote books about adolescence and family life, so that I could be a better parent and spare them the grief that I had experienced with my own warring, divorcing parents.

Devastating diagnosis

We would have years ahead of us to have fun and be selfish. Or so I thought. And then came the diagnosis. I had regular mammograms and had mentioned to two separate GPs that there was an itchiness in my left breast. When the aching in my ribs developed into sharp pains, tests revealed I had three fractured ribs and numerous lytic lesions all over my spine and ribcage – triple negative breast cancer, which had metastasised. Devastating news, which sprang without warning. No lumps. No noticeable changes. Just this itching. Now with an “advanced and aggressive” cancer, the future I had imagined we might have was suddenly whisked away.

Within days of the diagnosis I couldn’t stand for longer than two minutes or walk because of the pain. When the chemo started, it felt as if I had been run over by a train and infected with typhoid at the same time. I remember thinking that if this was what life was going to be like, then just kill me now. All of my anxieties about my daughters, now struggling with life in their early twenties, or what we might eat for supper, faded away.